Fat Free CRM - Ruby On Rails-based open source CRM | Hacker News Reader

Fat Free CRM - Ruby On Rails-based open source CRM

fatfreecrm.com

I've been looking at this software for a week or so. It has great potential but it's not ready to deploy just yet. I've already found about a half dozen bugs and crashes with the demo data that ships with the source.

However, once the bugs are ironed out this is going to be great.

Did you report the bugs?

No, I'm a bad Hacker :(

I'll jump in there again and file a bug report.

The phrase "Fat Free CRM" might work as a tagline -- if they wanted to emphasize a small core feature-set and interface -- but has problems as a product name.

It's very informal and its connotations are 'lean' or 'extreme dieting' or 'asceticism', rather than 'powerful' or 'moneymaking' or 'comprehensive'.

It's hard to imagine it in everyday workplace usage -- "did you enter that lead into fat free?" -- and it could even make overweight staff uncomfortable.

I completely agree. I thought it suspiciously akin to a play against "Sugar CRM", which is a much better name "Hey, did you enter that into Sugar?" If they're playing off a competitor's name, then someone should have coached them about how that practice usually leads to crappy names.

That said, it's open source, and might actually give someone the opportunity to perform an experiment I've been toying around with for years: Basically you release an open source product, fork it immediately and change nothing but the name, and see which version performs the best. Think of it like split-testing, but for the entire product.

That's an interesting perspective. There's some personal history of why I called it Fat Free CRM, but your point is well taken.

If I incorrectly assumed that you were just trying to differentiate from 'Sugar', then I apologize. It just seemed coincidental given the relatively few players in web-based CRM products (that I know of at least.)

This is really pretty great. Spent a few minutes adding contacts and tasks, and it went pretty well. Readmore is right about some of the demo data bugs, but I haven't ran into anything when i started from scratch.

Anyone have any thoughts on how this compares to SugarCRM and vTiger? SalesForce.com? Comparing screenshots, it looks a lot like SalesForce.com, but I haven't used either, so I dunno.

Don't know about the other two but vTiger is the crappiest, buggiest piece of shit I ever had the misfortune of handling. It's full of legacy crap from a bygone era when the original developers wrote it first in procedural PHP. Then the subsequent version in a horrible mix of OOP.

The software API's are horrendous and extremely hard to work with. The entire architecture is screwed up and very hard to grok at. IMHO it is best to keep away from this project.

I use highrise and for me, the email history is really the killer feature. Does anyone else know any other CRM systems that are so email centric?

It shouldn't be too tough to integrate email into fatfree (or any other app) using astrotrain: http://github.com/entp/astrotrain/tree/master. It turns any received email into an HTTP web hook call for your web app. It processes all of our Lighthouse/Tender Support email from a single instance.

Doesn't support Postgres?

I took a really short look at the source and it seems like the only MySQL specific feature is UUID generation (which can be ported to PostgreSQL in no time)

That's true. I believe you can use Fat Free CRM with Postgres without UUIDs, just like SQLite backend that is supported.

I'll take a closer look at supporting Postgress sometime soon. Among other things I'd really like people to be able to deploy to Heroku easily.

Yes, deploying FatFree CRM on Heroku would be incredibly important for me!

Isn't it Rails based? Can't you just throw down a new database.yml?

Just as a general entrepreneur question. If I were to use this source code, create a website that hosts fatfreecrm for other people and charge them money, would that be considered a violation of GNU?

Not at all. Now you would have to provide a link on your website that would allow someone to download the code with your changes and additions since this project uses the AGPL (also known as Affero GPL http://www.affero.org/oagpl.html )

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